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January 07, 2008

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gian

While surfing on the Net I found your blog, I stopped at it to have a rest and I explored it. There is interesting stuff displayed. Now I continue my surfing…
Make a stop at my blog, if you wish. Ciao.

nobody you know

I dunno, this just makes me think of Ray Agre's warning about creating large institutions out of software.

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/15.72.html#subj4

I mean, if I were the aliens invading the planet, how exactly would my plan differ from what we appear to be doing to ourselves?

Agre points out that a building design flaw will cause a collapse that is limited, but a software flaw in financial 'instruments' will cause a rolling collapse can propagate much, much farther.

Our current news closely resembles that.

I've been thinking for a long while that epidemiology and statistics will be the first place we start to get proof that problems exist --- they'll emerge from the background as clusters of increasingly improbability.

But only if there's quick and accurate reporting of failures.

We get that, more or less, in aircraft news -- watching the Boeing 777 threads, and the others about unexpected electrical failures shutting aircraft power down in flight over the last six months?

We get it a bit in other news, but the kinds of things that turn up seem so incredible sometimes only the conspiracy geeks can imagine it's more than coincidence, and we always prefer to explain problems as coincidence rather than bad design.

Dunno.

How many CPUs did you say are in a new car, and _why_ is this a good idea?

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